After two hectic weeks of life, I decided I wanted to dedicate a full day to getting back to mixing. But, the usual life stuff caught up with me. Undeterred, I decided to take a distributed approach. In spare moments, I accumulated tracks. On Friday, I selected and beat-grided the final tracks. That evening and for about 1 hour on Saturday afternoon, I set up some cue points. Saturday evening I made the final arrangement of tracks and recorded the mix. So, I guess you could say that my usual ‘system’ of making mixes got ‘distributed’. I think that’s a good thing in that forces me to adjust how I make a mix and gives me more flexibility in getting it done.
Not too much new on skills applications with this mix. It is primarily a very heavy use of cue points and experimentation to get to the final result. I did try to adjust how I mixed in tracks. I’m starting to jokingly refer to my usual method as a ‘sharps drop’ where I leave the levels about the same, go for about 8 bars at the end of track A’s chorus to lead into track B’s verse. So, I played around a decent amount with overlap length. My instructor from the DJing course seemed to enjoy longer transitions. It’s still a work in progress for me to make it sound good, but it felt GREAT to be back in ‘the studio’ 🙂
Enjoy!
Update 2018-02-04:
So, I listened to this a couple of times and felt that this was truly the worst mix I’ve ever made. I listened again and felt that a lot of it was just letting transitions linger too long. So, I decided to revisit the mix. In the process, I ended up making a lot of changes. Some transitions were shortened, but a lot of it became playing with the equalizer and volume levels. I also ended up mixing a track over a track for the first time. The last song, ‘Best of You’, gets a pretty cool in a tunnel sound when I played track over itself, but I found a nifty way to jump back on the 2nd version of the track playing and make it sound reasonably good. It’s still not perfect, but I definitely feel it is an upgrade. Give it a listen!
As an added bonus, I’m uploading my mixing plan. The stuff in blue was my original plan. The red writings are my revisions.
